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He's at it again! Who? Bombjack of course! This time though, he's collecting treasure. A little bit safer than defusing bombs.

Wrong, because this treasure just happens to be guarded by some very villainous, er, villains who would like nothing better than to see you fail.

In this, his second caper, Bombjack swaps his 'sweetness and light' image for that of a 'Rambo', since this time he has come armed with a knife. Must be a dodgy area.

Armed and dangerous, Bombjack starts his new adventure only to find things have changed. The screen layout has gone all '3D' and the normal 'grab all the stuff and avoid the baddies' theory has gone out of the window, you need to think in this one.

You control Bombjack with the joystick and moving left, right, up and down will cause him to do so. The fire button now does a sort of stabbing action.

The screen is made up of platforms, but they are drawn in 3D. This means that, when you jump up you are going into the screen, and down will cause you to come out. Don't worry, it's quite easy really.

Moving Bombjack around, you must collect the goodies and watch the monsters carefully. Only attack them when they are near the edge as they will fall off the edge and die faster. Attacking one elsewhere will cause you to lose energy as you battle.

The energy gauge at the side of the screen indicates you fighting power, and the monsters have energy gauges too. Your energy will increase if you stand still for a while, but time's not on your side, so don't dawdle too often. You won't die when the clock runs out, so to speak, but the monsters mutate and became harder to kill as time goes on.

On most sheets the monsters start as dinosaurs, which only move about on their own platforms, slowly transforming. But on other levels they have already changed and are running around all over the place.

When you are jumping about, you can't just go from platform to platform. To get to a certain treasure you may have to jump on every other platform to get it, which makes this game a little hard in places.

The backdrop graphics for each sheet seem to be the same all the way through, with only two different scenes. The first is a lava pit, which isn't very convincing, and the second is outer space, and it's all coloured blue - in fact it looks like a Christmas card scene.

This does detract from the game a little, but not overall. The rest of the graphics, like your man, are all a bit on the small side, and can cause a bit of a headache when trying to move quickly.

The only thing that saves Bombjack II from disaster is its great gameplay, the most of thinking and planning that you have to do.

Oh, and by the way, Elite have done a most sensible thing in putting the first Bombjack on the other side of the tape, which means this is a good bet in the value stakes.